Help Me Out By Asking Me Anything

(NOTE: Based on time elapsed since the posting of this entry, the BS-o-meter calculates this is 6.03% likely to be something that Ferrett now regrets.)

My goddaughter Rebecca wore a rainbow princess dress that we got her for Christmas. She loved that thing. I saw her wear that dress more than anything else, wearing it to school, wearing it to play in, tearing around the house in this gaudy, frilly thing.
Last night, Gini and I put the dress in the corner with my dead Grampa’s chair, my dead stepfather’s lumberjack shirt, and my dead Uncle Tommy’s cane. Our little shrine to the fallen. And then we drank a couple of glasses of wine and read Cracked articles aloud to each other to laugh and finally, at two in the morning, I realized I needed an Ativan to sleep on top of that. Now I feel stomach-sick and logy.
I’m coming to realize that this grief is like arthritis, a lifelong condition with flareups. I’ll have good-Rebecca days and bad-Rebecca days, and… they’re all boring. It’s the same emotions over and over again, and I don’t want to talk about them because there’s nothing to be said.
So this is not a particularly good morning. But not quite bad enough to call in sick.
On most days, I keep myself amused through the day by reading comments as they come in (though I often wait until the end of the day to respond). To do that, I usually have to write an entry. And I was in the process of writing an interesting one about how you disclose your relationships to your other partners in poly, because that “How much should I tell them?” is one of the trickiest things about managing multiple partners, and… I just fell apart. I’ll probably do it tonight, God willing. It’s a solid topic.
But on the days I have nothing to offer, I ask you to give me amusement by asking me questions that you honestly want to know the answer to. Not bullshit questions like “How much wood could a woodchuck chuck?” but anything else ranging from “So what’s your opinion on curling?” to “How do you manage a girlfriend and a wife?” to “What’s your favorite bit about writing?” to, well, whatever. I’ll answer honestly. And you’ll distract me a bit on a day when I could use some distraction. So it’s a mitzvah. If you can manage it.

I usually don’t like bands these days; I pick and choose from iTunes, and have a rampant flittering nature. So all my favorite bands are old, which I dislike, but that’s more a shift in how I consume music.
1) Frank Zappa
2) The Beatles
3) They Might Be Giants
4) The Circle Jerks
5) The Kinks

Coming so soon after Rebecca, the “boy loses Mom to cancer” in the opening scene was a sucker punch. Not the movie’s fault, though. I liked it, barring the snarly bits of unnecessary and out-of-character misogyny.

1) The save point. I’d be able to save my life at any moment and replay it from there. (And yes, that’s the direct inspiration for “Run,” Bakri Says.
2) Probably just Joe Dude. I don’t think one man with a save point could make a super-difference to the world.

You could so totally change the world with a save point. You could try all kinds of experiments and, if they don’t work, go back in time and undo them.
Would you remember what you did before your restores? If so, you could make some pretty dramatic medical advancements. You wouldn’t even need a lot of funding. You could start a kickstarter campaign, raise a few million dollars, give it to a promising researcher and, if it doesn’t pan out, just restore and give the money to another researcher. That same couple of million dollars could be reused until you got something amazing made, and then you could run another Kickstarter.
Actually, you wouldn’t even need Kickstarter. You could play the lottery until you won.
You could walk in as the conflict resolution specialist between Israel and Palestine, for example. Any time someone breached the peace, you could restore and stop them before they could. And if your recommended solution flopped, you could restore and try another one.
You’d basically have unlimited power. As long as you only did one thing that you couldn’t stand to lose at a time.

So two questions, pick A, B or both:
A) Do you have any thoughts on respectful ways to have a poly-style guest for 1/2 of a couple in a small apartment? General tips/tricks an dos/don’ts or anecdotes please 🙂
B) I only have pets vicariously through people on the internet, can we please get a status update on your puppy-friend?

A) Is an essay. Do not have spoons for essay today. Ask again later.
B) Shasta has slimmed down after porking up a bit after being fixed, and is slowly developing behavior changes as she matures and gets used to her house. She barks more, which is vexing, but she’s gotten very good about playing and not using her mouth. (She would bite – not hard, never enough to hurt, but so quickly and deftly that it freaked people the fuck out.) She is the world’s most eager dog, and every time we get up she leaps up and goes, “HEY! HEY! WHERE ARE YOU GOING?!? WHAT WONDERLAND CAN YOU WHISK ME AWAY TO??!?” and we always feel bad because we’re just getting up to pee.

My Aunt Laney’s chocolate chip cookies. Brilliant. My favorite cookies ever.
At one point in time she made a big batch for me for the drive back to Michigan, where I lived, and put them in a big Ziploc baggie. It was a twelve-hour drive; I waited three hours, anticipating the taste of those damn delicious cookies, trying to hold off for my prize. Finally I crossed the Jersey border and DOVE in, devouring them, only to discover that she’d used to store laundry detergent in that bag before putting cookies in, and I drove for an hour with a mouthful of soapy chocolate.
We still laugh about that.

Assuming you’ve played some more Hearthstone since the tweet, what are your thoughts so far?
Or if you haven’t or are saving that material for a later blog
If The Outer Limits or the Twilight Zone were to come back again, which of your short stores would you most like to see made into an episode?

I have, and Heartstone is a little frustrating because I’m not sure how to build a deck yet, and the strategy articles focus on “Here’s your archetypes and netdecks!” without actually discussing, say, the ideal mana curve. And my first draft was a disaster. I’ll probably go back, but right now it’s like, “Hrm, this is vexing.”
If the Twilight Zone came back, I’d have Richard Matheson do a clean draft of “Run,” Bakri Says. (I’d also bring back Richard Matheson.) For the Outer Limits, In The Land of the Deaf was practically made to be an Outer Limits.

Have you always seen the editing process as a way to fine-tune your work, or have you had to push through a “this is sucking the fun out of writing” phase? If the latter, how did you change your attitude?

I used to be a string Kingist, as he said in “On Writing” that he did two drafts and that was what you needed. Then, at Clarion, I discovered that most people were multiple drafters, and particularly so if they were gardener writers like me who had no idea how the story ended until they got there, and I started to see exactly how violent and far-reaching a draft could be to the story.
So I used to see the drafting as irrelevant. Now I see it as critical. The joy is irrelevant to me, as I write without hope, but I realize that my stuff peaks around drafts #4 through #6, with a 10% Solution pass to crunch the prose.

I’m aiming to make about $1500 with as little of that income as possible coming from traditional, scheduled-to-be-there-every-week work.
Got any great, brilliant, creative, little, funny, surprising, or other ideas?

There’s plenty of ways to do it. Depends on what catches your fancy. I mean, it took me a while to do that with writing (though I do), so I guess, how do you wanna do it?
If you’d filmed Ferguson you’d have that in your pocket easy by now.

You have been in the thick of the changes in publishing and distribution over the last 5~10 years. We are still in the thick of this change, what trends do you see continuing in the next 5 years? What trends are people not paying attention to that will become big? What are things people are focusing on that will be moot in 5 years?

1. Other than Gini, how many partners do you currently have? More in the sense of long-term relationships, since I know you have many many crushes. 🙂 I think I know the answer to this, but I just wanted to make sure there’s nothing I missed.
2. What’s the best thing you’ve eaten in the past week?
3. What’s your favorite snack of the chip or pretzel variety?

1) I have A, my long-term girlfriend, and… well, I have one sweetie who just broke up with me to go monogamous, another sweetie who is in the null zone at the moment, and two women I have approval for sexual contact with should I ever be in the same town with them, which is unlikely in the near future.
That’s defining “partner” by “who I can have sex with,” which is deeply unsatisfying, and leaves out a lot of other relationships on various trajectories. So I dislike it. But that’s the snapshot at this moment.
2) Probably a Bearden’s burger. The best burgers in town.
3) Probably Bugles. All of them are bad for me. No, wait, pita chips and hummus.

Interestingly enough, I’m actually dealing with that in the novel I’m writing now.
“The papers spoke as if punching Psycho Mantis in the face was the greatest thing Paul could have done for humanity. True changes weren’t created by single battles, but by eking out thousands of tiny kindnesses and efficiencies. The news simplified things into disturbing Us vs. Them mentalities.”

I have a serious question about poly.
The thing that keeps us from trying it (although we think it might solve a few problems) is the concern that a serious emotional relationship with another partner would materially alter (and possibly mess up) our existing relationship, even if it was clear from the beginning that the existing relationship is the “primary” one. We fear that it would change our internal dynamic in a way that might not be healthy for us. At the same time, we don’t imagine that third (or fourth) person would be someone we saw “just for sex” (and we don’t think that that would be possible for us anyway): we think that there would (and should) be a strong emotional bond with such a person — which is what we’re afraid would mess us up.
I imagine this is a conundrum that has faced many poly couples in the past. Is there a sound way of thinking about it, or a standard answer to the concern?

Sorry about the delay on this one. This got spam-trapped.
There would be an emotional bond. And that kinda stuff comes with a learning curve. It will materially alter your existing relationship, in potentially awesome and potentially bad ways. You’re correct in assuming there will be a transition time, and not all people make the transition.
The problem is, it’s hard to tell in advance.
What poly will do is shine a flashlight on all the areas of your relationship you haven’t questioned in a while. You’ll have someone who does something entirely different coming in, and their ways will be worse in some (not a problem) but better in others. And that “better” will cause some conflict as you realize that hey, this was stable but that stability came at some lowered expectations, and now that you see you can have that, well, you want that.
If you’re dumb, you take all the good stuff that exists for granted and see only this improvement. And then you go chasing this new beauty, forgetting all the foundations you’ve built, and walk away from a perfectly wonderful car because THIS one has CUPHOLDERS. And plus, there will be things that you just thought were “you” things that turn out to be “everyone” things, but didn’t come up because you were only romantic with each other, little rituals you thought defined you that turned out to be, well, a little more global, and you’ll discover things you didn’t realize bruised you but do, and have all sorts of upsets.
On the plus side, if you’re smart, you wind up appreciating things you never had before, looking at this new relationship’s inevitable dysfunctions and going, “Hey, we work here.”
If you’re strong, you can settle into a new rhythm with each other – one where you’ve used these new relationships to address some problems in your own, and come out super-stronger, because you’ve now added cupholders to the car, and discovered that some rituals are entirely you, and be stronger as a couple despite the fact that you’re dating other people. Which is counterintuitive, but hoo boy does it happen.
But there’s no way of knowing for sure. It’s a trauma. And not everyone wants to go through that. But if you think you can weather some upheaval, it will alter your dynamic – and it can seriously be for the better. No way of telling. But there’s risk, and reward.